


hear the song of gentle mourning

by actualflower



Series: fireteam: condor [5]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Destiny 2, Gen, anyway y'all i cried during that first mission idk about y'all but i'm a fuckin Mess™, mentioned f/f/f relationship, two robots in search of Not Death: the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 12:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12276315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualflower/pseuds/actualflower
Summary: Examoris-83 survives the fall. Now, she just has to survive the journey.Enter Snare-000, an Exo who remembers too much and nothing at all.Set during the Adieu mission.





	hear the song of gentle mourning

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'd, as ever. enjoy. <3

She finds him alone, surrounded by the bodies of Red Legion soldiers, meticulously cleaning his gun. The vibrant green of his finish wars for attention with the red spattered on the rock he sits on, for all the world a nonchalant king. The corpses don't help dispel the image, either.

He casts a lazy glance her way - no, not lazy: his optics narrow and his fingers slow, movements deliberate, one foot hitching just a little higher on the rock so he could spring forward or roll away. He looks like a spring coiled. When he notices her Ghost, optics flashing whip-fast, he doesn't relax.

“Guardian?” she tries and winces at the rusty sound of her voice. She'd wave, but she has a sidearm in one hand and the other arm is still sparking and immobile.

He grunts. “Warlock.” His gaze settles on her arm. “Bad fall?”

Her slash of a mouth opens, but closes again. She just nods.

He doesn't step forward or pat at his side - all he does is scoot just a little to the side, leaving enough room for another body to sit. Examoris limps forward and slumps onto the rock, sparking arm close to the other Exo.

“You're the one that fell?” A question phrased as a statement.

“Yes.” A response. Her sidearm feels weak in her grip. Her Ghost, so full of light before, is flagging and weary. She sets her gun in her lap before offering her hand. He sets down with a metal  _ thunk _ , single optic shuttering for a brief moment.

“What'd he look like?” 

“Two-point-five meters tall. Approximately 350 kilograms. Mostly muscle mass. Limited peripheral vision. Limited lateral movement in the arms. Extreme strength.” She closes her optics. Her voice grows softer, smaller. “Imposing. Indomitable. Vicious. Built like a tank. A Titan, but all wrong in the Light, twisted - not the Void, not an absence, but an  _ abscess,  _ a wound-” 

“Got it, Warlock.”

She closes her mouth sharply, shrinks a little closer to her Ghost.

He sighs, or at least gets as close as an Exo can. It's a very good facsimile. He must get a lot of practice. His hand twitches toward her, almost as if he's reaching, but a spark of electricity snaps through the air; his fingers are ruined on his left hand. A bitter thought crosses her mind: together, they have one set of functioning arms. “Name's Snare.”

He doesn't offer a number. “Examoris-83, at your service.” She holds her Ghost up in her hand. “This is Ghost.”

He nods again. His own Ghost appears over his, and he motions to it. “Glitch. Where you going?”

“Away. There was a - bird. We were following it. Or it was following us. Is. Is following or being followed.” She winces again. She sounds crazier than usual; Bera would laugh and nod, and Ryf would give her that patient stare that meant she was really considering what Examoris was saying - 

But they’re not here. Examoris doesn’t know if they’re still  _ alive. _ She looks down at the Ghost in her palm. 

“Been a week.” He doesn’t specify since what. It is unnecessary. “You been walking the entire time?”

Examoris nods. “Yes.”

He shakes his head. “Need more rest. Recharge. Whatever it’s called for us. Light’s gone.”

There’s a lump in her throat. She doesn’t have a throat, not a real one, but she swears there’s a lump there, impossibly hard to speak past. “I know. It’s - hard. To recharge.”  _ Alone _ , she doesn’t say.

He shrugs and resumes his work on his gun, eyes keeping careful watch on the treeline.

Examoris was never one to reject a gift. She lays back against the rock uncomfortably, fitting herself as closely as possible on the little shelf. Her Ghost flutters up weakly, out of her grasp.

She can hear him speaking while she shutters her optics. “Are you certain we’ll be safe here? We’re still  _ surrounded _ by Cabal corpses-”

There’s indignant sputtering then, the kind that only comes when someone tries to pat Ghost and push him down. “Quiet, little light.”

“Traveler’s Light,  _ not you too _ -”

Snare snickers, which is an interesting sound - a warble of synthesized vocals, the click of metal lips, the whirr of gears. “You’ll be safe.”

She feels the Ghost settle back down against her upturned palm. His broken and bent finials don’t let him settle cleanly, but he does the best he can. She breathes deeply, a  _ one-two-three-one-two-three-four  _ that Bera taught her to fall into recharge faster. 

_ “Y’ain’t gotta breathe, I know, but it’ll help, right? You were made to be sorta human, so some stuff has to translate - like feeling relaxed when you breathe deep. Meditation and stuff, right? Like you warlocks do.” _

The memory is Light-warm in her mind, and she falls asleep to the sound of birds in the trees and Snare cleaning his gun, a  _ click-snap-click _ rhythm that she matches to her breathing until she’s gone.

* * *

 

“Snare-”

“Quiet.” He keeps his optics locked on the scope. A hundred meters away, a Red Legion soldier walks, seemingly alone. He leans down, picks something up. Grunts. Keeps walking. 

Examoris can hear the snarls and grunts from here, the heavy footsteps that crush the undergrowth. She grips her sidearm a little tighter. “ _ Snare. _ ”

“ _ Quiet, _ ” he hisses between clenched denta. 

Examoris wants to shake him and make him move - the Red Legion he's sighting down isn't even  _ doing _ anything, just patrolling, and from here it's more aimless ambling than anything else. They should leave, move, keep going, but Snare is just  _ watching them _ . 

Examoris vents harshly, still quiet as a whisper. She's angry, not an idiot.

Silently, she requests a pulse rifle from her Ghost; she'd scavenged it from a camp of dead guardians after taking their helmets and tags and what ghost shells she could find. She can't use the gun properly, but she can at least use the sight to see a touch closer at what has Snare so adamant.

When she sees, her optics flare.

Ghost shells of every color, every size, decorate his belt, armor, even his gun, like a macabre collection of the dead. An icy crawl of anger threads her veins. She wishes now more than ever that she could find that space-between-the-Light again, that she could find the Light at all.

Quietly, she slows her venting until she's not breathing at all, letting her coolant system do its work. She transmats the rifle back into her subspace, pulls her sidearm free, and waits.

In the week and a half that she and Snare have been traveling together, she’d like to think she's learned some things about the other Exo, one of which is this: he will always, always fight.

Examoris scans the clearing ahead as best she can - the paths are rocky and jutting, giving far too much potential cover for more enemies, more than she'd like, but the wind only carries the sound of a single set of boots toward them, and no grunts of the Cabal’s guttural language. She blinks; her infrared optical sensors are damaged, so no luck there. 

The legionary grunts. Snare tightens his grip.

He doesn't ask if she's ready - another quirk, one she had to learn quickly lest she be left behind - only inhales and holds it for half a tick before pulling the trigger. 

Examoris is already moving, rolling behind an outcropping of rock a few metres away. She hears the cabal roar - no headshot, then. She grips her sidearm tighter and peeks over the top,  _ 94 metres at one o'clock, wind speed 2.7m/s  _ \- her first shot goes wide, but the second one hits home, clipping its right arm. The soldier snarls and begins charging at her location, only to be caught by another round in the leg. It stumbles. Examoris fires another round, square in the chest, and then up, right into its temple. 

From this distance, with the cabal’s thickly-boned forehead, her sidearm doesn't do more than agitate it, but it gives Snare enough time to line up one more shot.

She walks over when it's down, nudges the corpse with a boot, sidearm aimed at its head. When it doesn't move, she vents in relief.

She begins the process of stripping the beast - weapons, armor, ammo. The Ghosts she pulls away carefully, places them with gentleness into the subspace. It's starting to become too full, she notes worriedly, and looks down at the Ghosts yet to be received.

Snare kneels next to her and wordlessly passes the shells to his own Ghost.

She returns to scouring the body. Once its been cleaned of anything potentially useful - a shotgun, ammo packs, armor pieces that might fit a Titan were they so inclined - they slink away, leaving the body to be found by patrols or carrion crows.

Hours and miles later, when the sun has dipped below the mountain peaks and the pair have settled into a shallow recess in the rock, Examoris carefully pulls every new shell from subspace and arranges them, repairing them where she can, returning broken halves when she can find them. Ghost helps her, too, and when she beckons Snare over, he doesn't complain, just helps her sort through them in the low light of the small fire. 

Once they're as repaired as she can get them, she starts the slow process of accessing their memory cores. Ghosts, upon death, save the recording of their final moments to their shells themselves, along with a record of their Guardian’s name and designation. It allows other Ghosts, with the Light, to recover them and pair them with their Guardian, if they can be found.

It also allows an Exo, with time and patience, to access those records directly, even without the Light. 

Examoris pulls the little journal from her subspace as well, balancing it on one knee while she holds a shell in her working hand, fingers digging into delicate circuitry like a surgeon. A little needle extends from her finger, and she gently presses it into a port.

She freezes for a long moment, then sags. She extracts her finger, then picks up the pencil tucked into the journal and writes, carefully,  _ Ari Mahmoud. Human. Male. Warlock. Blue spines, white lotus on the front.  _ She hands it to Ghost. He carefully places another in her palm.

She continues for hours. Each shell, marked and labeled and placed with care. Her one working arm is stuttering by the time she gets to the last, sun long gone behind the mountains. When she finishes, she sags against the rock. She drags her knees up to her chest, wraps her arm around them, rests her head against them. Ghost settles on her glitching palm.

“Did good today,” Snare says, more gravel than words, and then coughs. “Good job.”

“I am not a kinderguardian, Snare-000. I do not need coddling.” She thinks, then sighs. “I appreciate the thought. I do not want to sound ungrateful.”

He looks at her for a long moment, hands still on his gun. “Never told you my numbers.”

“You did not need to. The best of us tend to carry a reputation.” She lifts her head, rests it against the wall behind her. “You do not speak. Others do. The hunter with no numbers and a vicious tongue. The hunter who takes what no one else will. The robot who does not sleep.” She lets her optics offline. “It is easy to put the pieces together, especially when they are the same puzzle.”

“Could say the same about you, Hivebane.”

If her lips could curl into a smirk, they would. Instead, she lets her grin slide into her voice. “Touché.” Her shoulders tense suddenly, memory sharp. “I'm not the only one with that title.”

Bera, too, is Hivebane, and Ryf, but she prefers to be called Young Wolf - well, she prefers nothing at all except Ryf, or Titan, and Bera never liked the titles, either, but she'd always smile when Examoris would introduce her as Hivebane, and -

She curls her arm around her knees a little tighter.

Snare’s focus returns to his gun. The fingers of his ruined hand make the motions difficult, but he doesn't ask for help. He never does.

After a long moment, he speaks again. “They go down?” His voice is quiet, barely a rumble of words.

_ They _ . Ryf and Bera. How cleanly they are summed, that a single word can hold them. And Examoris is fighting her vocalizer, trying to get the words past that damnable lump in her nonexistent throat. “I - I don't know. I just-”

Snare fidgets, which is in itself an odd movement, like he's forgotten how and is trying to remember. “You wanna… talk about ‘em?”

“Not really, Snare.”

His shoulders slump in something like relief, but it's too sour-edged with defeat. ”...Sorry,” he says, waiting a beat too long.

She wants to reassure him - her hand clenches on her leg, itching to reach out. She just sighs and settles against the rock. “Not your fault, Snare. Far from it.”

He  _ humphs  _ under his breath. His optics dart back to his gun, that same pistol he always cleans no matter how hard it is to move his fingers.

Examoris falls into recharge with the same  _ click-snap-click _ that's followed her for the past week.

* * *

 

_ Heaven herself, the tender warrior, I believe she sent for u- _

Examoris jolts awake; her arm spasms violently at her side, her motor seizes and clenches in her chest - logically, she knows she does not need to breathe, but if she only could drag in a breath she'd be  _ fine- _

“Easy, Warlock.” Snare's voice is a lifeline that she clings to greedily, pulling herself from the mire of panic by focusing on his bright purple optics, his vibrantly green paint, anything that's not a soft voice singing to her as she wakes in the medical wing of the Tower. “Breathe.”

“Exos don't dream,” she whispers, as if it will scour her processor clean. 

“Bullshit,” he retorts, but his face twists into something close to a grimace. He carefully offers a hand - the one that functions.

She looks at it for a long moment - too long, if how Snare fidgets is anything to go by - but eventually takes it in her own. She levers herself to standing on unsteady legs, vertigo making her view swim before her processor catches up with her optics.

Ghost hovers nervously on the edge of her vision, and she pings him an affirmative before patting him gently. He sputters halfheartedly, more concerned about Examoris than keeping up appearances.

“You good?” Snare asks, gruff.

“Exos don't  _ dream _ , Snare.” She looks at him sharply - she doesn't know why, but she has to make him understand. Exos don't  _ dream. _ They never have. It's all memory.

He frowns for a moment, optics calculating, and then - “Alright, Warlock.”

A weight lifts, and she feels like she can breathe again.

They don't talk as they pack up what little they set out for camp, covering the fire with dirt and scrub brush. Examoris does not look back.

* * *

 

There is another week, and another. Examoris fashions a sling for her deadened arm. Snare makes a splint for his broken fingers. Their Ghosts remain exasperated and terrified in turns. The hawk remains a constant in their journey - whether they follow it or it follows them is still uncertain, but they travel together nonetheless.

They keep moving.

* * *

 

The mountains grow steep and dangerous on their descent; this is not the first time Examoris has faced dizzying heights and falls that could kill, but it is the first time she can remember being able to truly die while facing them. 

Ghost buzzes with caution every time she hops from ledge to ledge, mother hen to the last; Snare makes the jumps first, Hunter grace apparent even without the Light. Examoris struggles behind him, her dead-weight arm making each jump off-balance.

She knows the second she jumps that she won't make it. Her foot slips off the rock awkwardly, her good arm flinging towards Snare. He's already moving with something as close to alarm as she's ever seen in his optics.Their hands click together midair, gripping tight - then, his dead fingers unclench.

Examoris thinks that it's unfair; she survived the first fall only to be waylaid by another.

She shutters her optics at the last second. The image stamped on her retinal sensors is of Snare, reaching down the ledge, dead fingers limp.

* * *

 

She does not die.

The pain is immediate, but not untenable - an ache that speaks of life, continued. She would know. It has become her life since the fall. Well, the first one, anyhow.

She rolls with the impact, ending up on her back with her processor scrambled. She doesn't dare reboot her optics until she feels less like an Exo-shaped dent lest she void her tanks from nausea.

When she finally does, the human woman staring down at her is distinctly not Snare.

“Someone left a perfectly good Guardian lying around.” The woman grimaces. She looks, Examoris notes, oddly like pre-Golden Age depictions of angels, haloed with fading light as she is, and it takes her far longer than it should to realize she's offering Examoris a hand up. Far longer still for her to take it. “Things must be worse than I thought,” the woman says, giving Examoris another once-over and frowning again.

Her vocalizer is rebooting from the fall - Ghost takes pity on her and speaks. 

She ignores the conversation, scanning above her - there, a bobbing Glitch in its purple-and-green shell, a silent Snare besides. He's too far away to discern his expression, but she gives him a thumbs up. 

A long beat passes, and he returns her thumbs up with one of his own. The sniper scope slowly retreats from view.

“Guardian?” The woman's concerned voice -  _ Suraya Hawthorne, _ Ghost gently tells her - pulls her back into focus, and she points toward the ledge where she fell.

“Another,” she croaks, more static than voice, but Hawthorne nods.

“More and more everyday.”  She turns around, raises a hand, points to where Snare sits -

Or sat, Examoris notes. Suraya frowns. “Didn’t you just have a friend up there?”

Examoris sighs static, and shakes her head. “Yes. Moment, p-p-p-please.” She presses a hand to her throat. She really does need to get her vocalizer fixed.

She counts the seconds without meeting Hawthorne’s gaze. One hundred and forty-two of them pass before she hears the snarl of boots sliding down shifting rock, and then Snare is at her side once more. If she were to turn, she would see him stride forward with that trudging step, hand already on his gun, optics burning a hole into Hawthorne with the intensity of their gaze. She does not turn around, and instead nods to their erstwhile ally. “Snare, Hawthorne. Hawthorne, Sna-a-a-re.”

He frowns at her. “Vocoder’s loose.”

She nods, gestures to the ledge. “Fall.”

He seems to find that answer satisfactory enough; he grunts and turns back to Hawthorne. “You got a way out?”

“I can do you one better.” She gives a sharp whistle, and there’s the flapping of wings - the falcon they’d been following dips into view and lands neatly on Hawthorne’s gauntlet. “Meet Louis. Best pilot we got.” She looks between the two of them. “What about you? Fit to fly?”

Examoris looks at her arm, then at Snare. “Pilot?” 

He nods. “Got a ship?”

Hawthorne grins. “We got plenty. Time to make yourself useful, Guardian. Pack it up, people!” She shouts the last as she turns her head over her shoulder, already half-jogging to the collection of motley ships and crew members behind her. “We leave in five! Do  _ not _ make me wait for you!”

Snare follows behind her, falling into step easily. Examoris stumbles, just barely catching herself before she falls. She can hear Ghost tutting into her ear - she ignores him in favor of following Snare and making sure she puts one foot in front of the other.

When Snare falls back and walks alongside her, she is quietly thankful.

As they step onto the craft and Snare takes the pilot seat, Examoris settles onto the floor in the small storage area in the back. She places her sidearm into its holster, places her hand on her knee, palm upturned. Ghost settles there - his broken and bent finials don’t let him settle cleanly, but he does the best he can. She listens to Snare mutter quietly into the comms,  _ check one-two, hunter ready to fly, got it, Hawthorne _ , and feels herself drift into recharge - a proper recharge, deep and dreamless - for the first time in a long, long while.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! examoris-83 is my warlock baby - snare-000 belongs to my friend mike, whose rambling with me during shifts at work spawned this creation. consider it the first part in a series that i hope to continue!
> 
> i have a [tumblr](http://banshee-44.tumblr.com), a [writing tumblr](http://kaytewrites.tumblr.com), and a [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/actualflower) if you'd like to follow me there!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [and the wind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12923397) by [recklessandburgundy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/recklessandburgundy/pseuds/recklessandburgundy)




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